As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
An information handling system may be provided with a main power supply unit (PSU) that provides power to multiple components of the system. Similarly, multiple information handling systems, such as servers, may be grouped together in a rack system powered by a common main PSU, e.g., such as for data center implementations. Either way, power requirements for a main PSU may change (e.g., increase) over time as power-consuming components are added. For example, additional power-consuming components may be later added to a given information handling system to result in increased total system power consumption from a single system PSU (e.g., such as general-purpose computing on graphics processing units and/or host bus adapters may be added when future network infrastructure allows higher bandwidth). Similarly, additional server systems (e.g., server blades) may be later added to a given rack server system to increase the total rack system power consumption from a rack system PSU. To accommodate the ability for such system expansion, main PSU's for information handling systems (or rack systems) are sometimes intentionally overprovisioned, i.e., by providing a main PSU having a higher power-supply capacity than initially required by system power-consuming components in order to provide enough power capability to accommodate future upgrades.
Power capping is a technique in which individual system power-consuming components (e.g., such as central processing units or rack server blades) are each assigned a maximum capped power usage level that it cannot ever exceed, such that the total power consumption of all system components when operating together at their maximum capped power levels does not exceed a given power level, which may be either the total power capacity of the main PSU or an assigned reduced power level for the main PSU when a main PSU is overprovisioned. In one example, during operation of a server rack, a baseboard management controller (BMC) of each given server monitors real time power consumption of the given server and issues commands to the information handling unit of the given server to limit CPU, memory, storage, networking power consumption below the assigned power cap for the given server by adjusting operating conditions of the information handling unit of the given blade server.